Charlie Kemp, director of the Healthcare Robotics Lab along with his research team has been awarded the use of the PR2, a personal robot, to develop open source applications for assistive robotics. Kemp’s Healthcare Robotics Lab was one of 11 chosen from a pool of 78 submissions that included the foremost names in robotics research, such as MIT CSAIL, Stanford and UC Berkeley. Willow Garage is spending over $4.4 million for the PR2 Beta program.

Kemp will be placing the PR2 in the "Aware Home" to study how robots can help with homecare and creative assistive capabilities for older adults. Their research includes developing easier ways for adults to interact with robots, and enabling robots to interact with everyday objects like drawers, lamps, and light switches. The Sponsor of the PR2 Competition was Willow Garage, a company that develops hardware and open source software for personal robotics applications. The awards were announced at the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) held in Anchorage, Alaska from May 3rd – 8th. 

Other Investigators on this proposal include, Profs. Wendy Rogers (Psychology), Jim Rehg (Interactive Computing), Andrea Thomaz (Interactive Computing) and Brian Jones (Director, Aware Home Research Initiative).

It does that using omni-directional wheels and compliant arms, and the only information it needs is the location and orientation of the handles. The researchers discussed their results at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, held May 3rd – 8th in Anchorage, Alaska, where they presented a paper, "Pulling Open Doors and Drawers: Coordinating an Omni-Directional Base and a Compliant Arm with Equilibrium Point Control.

A team of students from the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, calling themselves the Georgia Tech Flatliners, recently participated in, and took the first three prizes, at the National Health Information Network (NHIN) Code-a-thon Challenge held at Florida International University (FIU).  The Flatliners were enrolled in the Health Informatics class taught by HSI Associate Director, Mark Braunstein, MD, also a Professor of the Practice, in the College of Computing.

A team of students from the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, calling themselves the Georgia Tech Flatliners, recently participated in, and took the first three prizes, at the National Health Information Network (NHIN) Code-a-thon Challenge held at Florida International University (FIU).  The Flatliners were enrolled in the Health Informatics class taught by HSI Associate Director, Mark Braunstein, MD, also a Professor of the Practice, in the College of Computing.

The event was co-hosted by FIU, Open Health Tools (OHT) – an open source community for Health IT and the American Academy of Family Physicians National Research Network.  Sponsored by Medicity, the GT Flatliners comprised Ph.D. student Klara Benda and master’s students Adrian Courreges, Monosij Dutta-Roy and Hassan Khan. The NHIN Challenge asked teams to create innovative stylesheets to display the information in a Continuity of Care Document (CCD) to a primary care physician taking calls from patients after office hours. The idea is to develop a CCD visualization tool that facilitates an efficient and effective phone consultation between the on-call doctor and an unfamiliar patient. Not only did the solutions have to interpret and display data error-free; they also had to facilitate the most efficient use of the physician’s time. The Flatliners, competing against professionals in the Health IT field, came up with the following solutions – a problem-based approach, a multi-context approach and a rapid-access approach:

• Problem Oriented Approach (winner): arranged the clinical data by problem so that the physician could hone in on relevant information to the particular problem the patient is presenting.

• Multi-Context Approach (second place): provided a highly flexible visual display that allows the physician to arrange information according to his or her particular "mental model" for handling a particular problem.

• Rapid Access Approach (third place): provided quick and easy direct navigation among all of the clinical areas in which data is stored in the CCD.

http://hit.fiu.edu/challenge.htm

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